I haven’t used it long enough yet to form a novice review worthy opinion of it other than it is easy to use for its exhausting list of built in features. I knew I made the right choice with this model though due to it’s GPS marking feature. For anyone living or driving in Nevada the stealthy-ness of your detector is of no importance, the GPS is however critical. Nevada Highway patrol uses a standard radar detector proof method of writting millions of tickets everyday.

In Nevada they paint 1 foot wide horizontal white lines on both sides of the road in some areas, then they paint simular lines in 1/4 mile incriments down the road for a mile. At the end of these zones it’s nothing to see up to 8 NHP cars around the next turn or over the next hill crest with sometimes 2-3 people pulled over by each one of them.

They never run out of customers the way they are doing it. They have a small aircraft flying high above who uses a stop watch in his hand to time each car as it passes by the white marks, then they have a chart to calculate the speed based on the time and he radios into the large clump of awaiting patrol cars when he has a speeder. There’s nothing for any radar detector to pick up with this tricky method they use heavily here.

Enter the GPS feature of the 9500i, now I can mark off on the GPS system of the 9500i where these white line areas on the highway are located and I get a warning each time as I’m coming up on one. This works perfect out here because the roadside in the desert out here is featureless so it’s impossible to make a mental note of where the marks are even if you drive the same route every day. You can try to watch for them, but it distracts your driving and your always afraid you may have briefly missed one. 9500i works absolutely perfectly for this.

Having the alert go off is just what I needed to help me pay better attention to my speed. When driving down long stretches of featureless desert highway its all to easy to accidently have your speed drift a little hi (or low). Leave it to luck that when you do accidently drift over the speed limit slightly there’s going to be a cop ready to take your hard earned money from you. Before purchasing this I had just recieved my first two tickets (for anything) in my life. Both only 2 days apart, both for doing 80mph in a 75. JUST 5 miles an hour over the speed limit due to accidental speed drift. Both times over 8 other cars were lined up on the side of the road with me all also getting tickets from the NHP zero tolerance crack down fundraisers. The tickets were only $67.00 each, and no points on my license since they were in a “rural zone”, but still, that’s $134 I could have used a lot more badly than they needed it.

My only complaint so far with the 9500i is a mounting problem with it. I live in Nevada on the California State line so I do about equal driving in CA. In CA it’s illegal to have suction cups on your windshield, so the supplied mounting bracket isn’t an option. Velcro to the dash looks like crap, plus it places the detector behind my rested windshield wipers. Escort doesn’t offer the visor clip for the 9500i because it places the unit too close to the roof of the vehicle and has an adverse effect on the GPS feature. So for now I’m stuck with using the suction cups in Nevada so I can use the much needed GPS. Then when I cross over into CA I have to use rubber bands on my visor since the GPS isn’t needed by me for highway driving there like it is in Nevada. It’s a big hassle having to do this so I wish they could come up with a legal alternative mounting option for it I could buy as an accessory like someway to clip it to the bottom of my rear view mirror (the rubber bands didn’t work well when this was tried, and bailing wire made the install too permanent, not to mention it wasn’t very cosmeticly pleasant to the eye). I have to use this same detector in multiple vehicles so a built in system wasn’t a viable option (nor affordable).

My only other complaint is with the Escort Company in general. After reading numerous online complaints from other people it seems they are all to eager to look for any excuse they can to void their warranty. Escort is the only company I have ever heard of in my life that voids the warranty if you don’t buy your product even brand new sealed in the factory box with serial number in tact from an “authorized reseller”. That means no Amazon.com or eBay, or numerous other (their list is enormous) populr and modern online shopping locations those of us on the internet frequently use, even if it’s still new and sealed in the factory box, your warranty is null and void. They also void warranties if products are not installed by a factory authorized reseller. They lost my sale on the ZR3 laser “shifter” because of this policy. I went into my only local authorized reseller and they were so unfamiluar with the Escort product line that I may as well been talking about it to a temporary employee at a Walmart. Not to mention there’s no way some kid working for $5.00 an hour in their install shop is going to install anything in my vehicle, factory authorized or not. If an item is sealed in a factory box when purchased, serial number in tact and a problem is due to a manufacturers defect it should be covered by the warranty no matter who you bought it from or who installed it. There are consumer protection laws in most regions insuring this despite Escorts “policy”.

Radar Roy I read once said that Escort listens to customer feedback on features, desires, and complaints about their products. I do like that about the company and in reading his comments on the matter it sounds like they mean this when they say it. I’d like some features added to the 9500i that could easily be obtained with a firmware update via the currently unused USB port on the device.

1) I’d like to see a fix for the issue the Guys from LIDAR pointed out where when a false signal is locked out it can also lockout a true threat signal. After seeing their review and footage showing this problem I’m not comfortable taking advantage of what was supposed to be a great feature and the primary reason behind the use of GPS in the system. Till then I just don’t use that feature and everytime I get a false signal it just annoys me that the claimed feature doesn’t work as claimed.

2) Feature I’d like to see added is an ability to take further advantage of the built in GPS capabilities. Since there are big brother is watching you paranoid people in the world they should make it an optional feature, but a Unique Identifier code could be software installed into each unit. This would be great for tracking and catching stolen radar detectors. Not to mention it could also save a lot of broken car windows when theives learned that stealing this particular detector will only lead to their arrest since if they try to use the device after being reported stolen the GPS will pinpoint their location. Escort could even generate more income by offering this as a monthly paid service like LoJack for stolen cars and laptops.

3) Worthless feature (future spoken feature at least) is the ability to have a public submittable on line data base you can download for speedtrap locations by other people that can be used with the GPS system. In a perfect world this would be a good idea, however in our world this would never work. Not all people are competant or trustworthy enough for this to ever actually work. Not to mention the speed trappers themselves will also have access to this information and know when they need to change up their locations. Its a good idea on paper, but in the real world we actually live in its not a very well thought out working plan.

However can i down load the pole camera locations yet or is the software stil not around? if so can you point me in the right direction?